You are in the sales business. This means that you have spent and will continue to spend a substantial amount of your time away from home shuttling between airports and office buildings. Nights are spent at local hotels or motels in the city where you end the day. You have learned to live out of a small suitcase and garment bag. You have searched for and purchased luggage that allows for the maximum degree of organization of the essentials needed to live on the road. Everything has its place and everything is in its place.
One benefit of your lifestyle is that you do get to spend weekends at home with your family. Your home life is kept as normal as possible and you spend as much time with your children as you can. In fact you are one of the assistant coaches for your son's baseball team. Last weekend they were practicing sliding into second base, and you were asked to demonstrate.
Now you have a nasty abrasion on your leg and your physician has prescribed a liquid antibiotic to be applied twice a day with a cotton swab. That means that you need to pack cotton swabs for your travels next week. Your organizational system for life on the road does not envision carrying cotton swabs.
What is the best way for a traveler to carry cotton swabs? Of course, he or she could grab a handful and toss them into the same case that houses his or her shaving or makeup kit, as the case may be. When time comes to use one, however, it has to be fished out of the bottom of the kit. The swab's fiber-tip has, more than likely, become contaminated from a leaky shampoo container, from debris that has accumulated in the bottom of the case or from the mere act of touching it. It certainly is not a satisfactory, much less a sanitary, way to carry a useful supply of swabs. Another solution is to grab a sandwich bag from the kitchen and toss in a few swabs, but they still become entangled with each other and difficult to extract when needed. Another prior art solution is to use an old medicine container. This, however, is a less than satisfactory solution, even if an appropriately sized one can be found, because the swabs may become wedged in the container and therefore difficult to remove.
Similar storage and transportation problems for handling fiber-tipped swabs in small quantities are encountered when small first aid kits or medical kits are being assembled. How can the swabs be maintained in a fresh usable condition without being contaminated by the surrounding environment?
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a container that can store a small quantity of fiber-tipped swabs that is convenient to use and does not require undue effort to extract a swab therefrom.